Shipments (also known as transportation orders, shipment orders, delivery orders, or simply orders) are movements of goods and constitute the basic element of transportation planning. Starting with orders for movement of goods (i.e. shipments), transportation planning involves creation of groups of shipments that can be moved together by single vehicles performing trips (which may require multiple stops). Specifically, shipments of small sizes that would otherwise be sent by Less than Truckload (LTL), Less than Containerload (LCL), Less than Carload (also abbreviated LCL), or Parcel services may be grouped into trips (also called voyages, journeys or missions) to be performed by full Truckload (FTL or just TL), full containerload (FCL), or full carload (also FCL) services. Full truckload services are provided by certain transportation carriers, for example, J. B. Hunt, Schneider National and Werner Enterprises. Full containerload services are offered both by ocean carriers (for example, Maersk Sealand or APL) and by domestic intermodal transportation carriers (for instance, Hub System or Pacer Stacktrain). Less than Containerload services are typically offered by Non-Vessel Operating Common Carriers (NVOCCs), intermediaries that offer “retail” movement of small shipments via space purchased “wholesale” from ocean carriers. Full carload and less than carload services are both offered by major and local freight railroads (such as Norfolk Southern and Burlington Northern Santa Fe). LTL services are provided by several transportation carriers, for example, Yellow Freight and Roadway Express. Parcel services are provided by many transportation carriers, for example, UPS, FedEx and DHL.
Creation of trips by grouping multiple orders is typically performed in companies (also called “shippers”) that own the goods and move them from/to vendors/customers, e.g. via trucks operated by truckload and other services (also called “carriers”) on public highways, via ocean carriers, or via rail carriers. Shipments in a transportation plan can be inbound for moving raw materials to a factory, from a number of vendors, or outbound for moving finished products from the factory, to various customers. Planning inbound and outbound shipments together allows continuous movement of trucks or containers which, due to minimization of empty (“dead-head”) movement of the truck or container, can be more efficient and less expensive than individual direct moves.
Companies that plan trips as described above typically use a transportation management system implemented by an appropriately programmed computer. The transportation management system has several software components, including a planning component and an execution component. The planning component focuses on creation of trips, typically consolidating multiple shipments, and the created trips are output in a transportation plan. The principal tasks of the planning component are typically executed in a computer as a batch job, with the transportation plan as its output.
A transportation plan prepared by a computer is typically examined, by a human transportation planner (also called “operator” and “user”), who may edit or “tweak” several of the trips therein. For example, during such review if a human transportation planner finds a trip to be overly circuitous or inefficient, that trip is manually modified, e.g. by moving one or more of its orders to another trip that happens to be also going from/to the same origin/destination (or a neighborhood thereof, or passing therethrough). Such manual modification of trips in a plan is time consuming because the human transportation planner must review numerous trips in order to decide how the overly-circuitous trip is to be modified.
Typically, a transportation planner spends up to eight hours (i.e. a whole business day) in manually reviewing and re-working all of the trips in a plan that has been generated by the planning component. At the end of the day, the transportation planner typically releases the modified plan (in its entirety) to the execution component for further processing, such as rating, tendering, booking, tracking, tracing, and so on. In some systems, a specific interface process communicates the manually-modified plan to the execution system, in a mechanism here referred to as “release”.
Note that in such systems, a trip that is satisfactory to the human transportation planner (either with or without tweaking) may be individually released for execution. However, to the knowledge of the inventors, no existing transportation management system allows their operator to manually release, in a single operation, more than one selected trip in a plan (but not the entire plan). The prior art systems enable an operator to release a transportation plan in its entirety (e.g. after all trips therein are satisfactory), or just one trip therefrom, but not a group of trips.
In certain transportation management systems, an unmodified plan, in the form output by the planning component, is made available to the execution component, without any manual intervention. Even in such systems, even after execution of the trips has begun, a transportation planner may manually evaluate which trips should be further progressed by execution processes, while other trips are to be kept under review and subject to manual modification. This may lead to a reduction in cost savings when a trip that is not fully utilized (i.e. having usable empty space on the vehicle making the trip) is automatically progressed to execution, and becomes tendered and booked by the execution system, because the planner can no longer change a trip once it reaches that state. Therefore, the human transportation planner may miss out on further consolidation opportunities to improve utilization of that vehicle, even though he may have already spent time performing the analysis to do so. Moreover, as there are typically hundreds of trips in a plan, manually evaluating and progressing trips is also time consuming and cumbersome.
One disadvantage of manual involvement in the release of trips, is that after an eight hour day a plan which has just been released may no longer be valid, e.g. if new orders have come in and/or existing orders have been modified or canceled, while manual review was being done. To accommodate such changes in orders, the plan may need to be manually re-worked some more at this stage, further delaying release of the plan to the execution component. Another disadvantage is that by the time the plan is released, it may become too late or too expensive to find a carrier to perform one or more trips in the plan. This is especially true when carrier capacity is tight because the carrier's capacity may be reserved or used up by other shippers who booked or tendered their needs sooner. Orders in such trips may have to be sent by more expensive services (e.g., Less than Truckload or Less than Containerload) due to the unavailability of truckload services on short notice.